Loved the analogies that came out - IRC, CB radio - sounds like there’s a history of social patterns reinventing themselves over new channels.

I fell for Osen, but will still *generally* follow back, at least for a few days. My Twitter Ratio is 0.79 which apparently means “Respected Among Peer Group” @jayfresh is TFF Ratio: 1.17
“Might be a Momma’s Boy” jobsworth TFF Ratio: 1.46
Might be a Momma’s Boy

Interstingly, @scobleizer with his autofollow has a pretty good ratio - but if I don’t see @replies at all, I figure folk aren’t engaging, aren’t so interesting to follow

Most of the hi volume followers are either pushing to be noticed, or think they are Scobelizer. These guys are indeed thinking more in terms of a broad CB radio channel. They don’t mind a near anonymous response as long as it carries some relevance.

During the nextweb conference, I used twemes.com, as a filter on the #nextweb2008 tag. In a way, the people I follow through Twitter have an implied # tag of “people I know who know me or of me”. When I tuned into anyone talking on the conference channel, then I got a much tighter CB radio experience. The locality combined with the digital presence. I didn’t say Rubber Ducky once.

But the other volume users are the bots. Some bot started following me today, and all it does is tweet when someone has posted something to its app. Strange raidal advertising.

Although IRC was always plagued by trolls, spammers and.. - well eejits really. So it’s probably for that reason it didn’t obviously suggest itself as an enterprise technology. That wasn’t the fault of IRC, but the culture that it arose from and the state of the technology at the time, dedicated clients, etc..

Around ten years ago there was an attempt to run an IRC channel, called #misc (run by James Somebody - a reference to the .misc newsfeed - Kerry were you on it?) It was OK, it was pretty interesting keeping it open all day watching what was little more than a twitter feed / public IM. Occasionally you’d spot somebody with a problem you could help with and it worked in terms of knowledge sharing.

IRC is probably now a very marginal pursuit, I’m not suggesting that it could make a comeback either. Twitter does that conversation better - though it will be interesting if Twitter is robust enough to cope with overwhelming ‘non-optimum’ behaviour such as that which killed IRC.

I wonder whether this first type are trying to use Twitter to market themselves or their service, using the idea that if you follow someone there’s a good chance they’ll follow you back.

Or even just click on the link to their site (or the site they’re spamming on behalf of) in their profile. I think that’s all some of them want.